The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  She looked at him puzzled, but she hadn’t read the scroll. He knew that spilling the blood of an innocent, one that was forsaken by all, would open the gates forever. He also knew the only way the gates could be closed. It was going to come as quite a surprise for Mr. Burns. He only wished he could be there to see it when he found out.

  39

  Daniel and Charlie walked up the dirt road to the gates of the graveyard. They were tired, sore, dirty, and they lost the scroll, but Daniel felt good. Exhausted, but good. Now that the infection was gone, he felt lighter and with more energy than he had in years. The backpack felt lighter, and the shotgun was easier to carry than it had been before. He still hurt – the infection might be gone but the wounds he suffered were still healing – but the pain didn’t bother him as much as it had before. Even the fog didn’t seem quite as foreboding as it had been yesterday.

  Some of it was the infection being purged from his body, but an even heavier emotional weight was lifted from him. He talked to Anna. That alone made all of this . . . well, not worth it, but at least a worth-while consolation for the hell he had to endure. Daniel knew now that Anna never stopped loving him, that he had done nothing wrong, had done nothing to chase her away. And now he knew that, in a way, Anna never left him. Then there was being able to forgive himself for the young life he was forced to take. Daniel didn’t think he’d ever forget the choice he made, or ever stop questioning whether he made the best choice, but for the first time, he felt he could live with the choice he made.

  The wolf was gone again. At this point, Daniel was getting used to it, and after his experience in the dream-world, or whatever it was, he was starting to believe Charlie’s theory that the wolf was some sort of animal spirit guide. Whether the wolf was a spirit or simply a very intelligent animal, the wolf did have a mind of her own and came and went as she wished. He felt the wolf would be back when she wanted to make an appearance.

  They came up to the gates of the graveyard. Two large hedges stood on either side of the gates like sentries. Then they moved, and Daniel realized they were sentries. He unslung his shotgun and took aim as the two nature monsters walked towards them.

  “Shit!” Daniel cursed, chambering a shell and choosing his shot, but Charlie placed a hand on the barrel and aimed the gun to the ground.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “They’re on our side.”

  The two nature monsters – what did Charlie call them? Avatars? – walked up to them like drug-sniffing dogs at an airport. Charlie never broke stride, forcing the avatars to follow them as the rustling creatures scanned them with what resembled heads. Daniel could feel the things sniffing him, though they had no nose to smell with. He remembered what Charlie had said, that while he was infected the avatars would want to rip him apart. One hand rested on his chest and felt the necklace he now wore, reminding himself he already passed this test once. The two avatars seemed to be satisfied, as they stopped sniffing the two men and went back to their sentry positions.

  Daniel was watching the avatars, still concerned they might change their minds and attack when he heard Bethany call his name. He looked to see Bethany just inside the gates of the graveyard, standing next to a scholarly-looking old man that he assumed was Charlie’s grandfather. The older man looked like a grayer, more wrinkled version of Charlie, but with none of the younger man’s humor, he could see that by how smiling seemed to be a struggle for him. Around Bethany’s neck was a necklace just like his and Charlie’s. Her eyes lit up, and Daniel dropped his shotgun and ran to his daughter. Bethany let go of the older man and ran to meet Daniel, but as they came within arm’s reach of each other, they both stopped. Daniel wanted to pull her tight to him, to hug her, but at the last moment, he questioned himself, unsure of how welcome that would be. He thought back to their first meeting, how Bethany regarded him as a stranger. Well, now she was happy to see him. That was an improvement, anyway.

  “You came back for me,” Bethany said.

  Daniel knelt down to her. “I told you I would.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Got something for you,” he said, his smile growing. He grabbed the backpack and pulled out her doll, Chrissy. She was a little dirty and smelled of smoke, but as he held the doll to Bethany she hugged it fiercely all the same.

  “I kept her safe,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t quite smile, but for the first time, Daniel didn’t think it was about him. She seemed happy to see him a moment ago. Something else was weighing on her.

  Before he had time to ask, the older man offered his hand to Daniel. “Mr. Burns, I’m Professor Lightfoot, Charlie’s grandfather. We have much to discuss. Quickly, you should come inside . . .”

  Daniel took the old man’s hand, which was much stronger than he thought it would be, and the professor helped Daniel to his feet. Daniel gave him a courteous nod and said, “The only thing we have to discuss is how to get the hell out of here. I appreciate your help, but I’m taking my daughter and going.”

  “Mr. Burns,” the professor said in a deep monotone, “there is no leaving here until the last rite is performed.”

  He turned to Charlie, who gave Daniel an encouraging nod. The professor led him into the graveyard. As Daniel walked in, Bethany stayed by his side. She didn’t take his hand, and she hugged her doll instead of him, but she didn’t leave his side. Daniel reached down and caressed her head. Bethany looked up, her eyes wide in surprise, but she didn’t object as she turned her gaze forward.

  The professor led them into a clearing near a dilapidated shack in the middle of the cemetery. Bethany sat next to Daniel on a fallen log, using the moss-covered thing like a bench. The professor stoked the remains of a previous fire, adding fresh kindling and sparking a new one. Charlie took a seat on an old stump, possibly the stump of the tree Daniel now sat on, and tightened the string on his bow. They sat in silence, Daniel waiting for the professor to fill him in on what was going on, what all of this chaos meant, but the old man worked on the fire.

  “So, what are we doing right now?” Daniel asked, breaking the silence. He felt Charlie and Bethany look to him, then join him in looking at the professor.

  “You need to understand what the last rite is,” the professor said, “and what is to be asked of you in order to do what is necessary to end this.”

  “Grandfather,” Charlie said, “they have the scroll.”

  The professor didn’t look up from the fire, now glowing with a modest but healthy flame. “That changes nothing. They can’t perform the last rite without Bethany, and we can’t perform it without the scroll. Eventually, someone will move the break the stalemate. Better us than them.”

  “Why do they need Bethany?” Daniel asked.

  The professor looked up at Daniel. “She is the key.”

  Daniel kept his eyes from rolling up. “Yeah, so I’ve heard. But why her?”

  “To answer that,” the professor said, “I need to tell you the tale of the Mad Arab.”

  This time he couldn’t stop his eyes from rolling, letting out an exasperated, “Aw, Christ.” After all of this, several days of being attacked and injured, hunting for his daughter, he was tired. He didn’t want a college lecture or hours of narration, he wanted straight answers.

  “When I was a boy, I was fascinated by the stories of our people,” the professor said, ignoring Daniel’s exclamation, “so much so that I learned them all and became the storyteller for our tribe. It is an honored position, second only to the chief, but it wasn’t enough. I went to college and earned a doctorate in anthropology, learning the stories of other cultures and other lands. It was there I first learned of the tale of the Mad Arab.”

  The professor threw something into the fire, and the flames shot tall and bright. Daniel swallowed his protest, expecting the flames to turn blue, but they kept their normal color. Still, he didn’t turn away, suspecting the flames would do more than just keep them warm.

  “The tale I tell you is
not of my people,” the professor said, “but of a people from far away and long since passed. They believed that before our world, there were two races of gods.”

  The flames shot tall, and Daniel could make out the rough outlines of two groups of people. The figures were animated, grabbing weapons, and preparing to strike.

  “They fought,” the professor continued, “and the leader of the victors slain the leader of the Others, and from his body, he created the universe.”

  In the fire, one of the flame figures ripped open another one from the other side, and from his body, sparks came flying out. The sparks floated into the night air, looking like stars and planets. Daniel felt the log shift as Bethany sat up straight, the light show catching her attention. He couldn’t blame her. He doubted they would ever see such elegant pyrotechnics in the normal world.

  “The Others were banished from creation,” the professor went on, “and they wait outside of creation for an opportunity to destroy it. Eventually, they found cracks in creation where they could sneak in. They would offer promises of riches and power to those who would help them. Eventually, a series of rites were written that once performed in order, would allow the Others into our world where they could destroy it.”

  The flames formed into shapes of hooded figures in a circle, and Daniel could almost hear them chanting. He pulled his gaze away from the fire and asked the professor, “Why would anyone help someone destroy the world? That makes no sense.”

  The professor shrugged his shoulders. “Some were lied too, others were bribed. Some simply hated their lives and wanted the world to suffer with them. As absurd as it may sound, there is no end of people willing to bring an end to this world.”

  Daniel searched his own experience for such a person, but he couldn’t find one. He had known drug addicts desperate for a fix and willing to kill their own mothers if it got them what they needed, but that was the closest he could think of. He supposed there were plenty of people that could be coerced or taken advantage of, but he couldn’t imagine a person who hated life so much he was willing to destroy everything.

  The professor threw more stuff onto the fire, and the fire engulfed the fuel and belched out flame as he said, “There came a king that wanted to expand his power. He performed the rites, but when he came to the last rite, he found he couldn’t go through with it, for the last rite required him to sacrifice his only daughter.”

  The flames showed a large man with a large sword standing over a smaller form, and Daniel could imagine – he hoped he was imagining it – the screams of a little girl begging her father to not kill her. With shaking arms, the larger form dropped the sword and embraced the smaller one. Then on the edges of the flames, tall, deformed shapes started to rise.

  “The Others were angry at him and moved to strike down the king, but the daughter stepped forward and sacrificed herself for her father,” the professor said.

  In the flames, the small form stood up and stretched out an arm. The tall forms on the end withered away.

  “Her selfless act, one of pure love, backfired on the Others,” the professor said, “and instead of opening the gates wide open and allow the Others to invade all of creation, it slammed them shut forever. Stricken by grief and guilt, the king fled his kingdom and became a wandering hermit. He became known as the Mad Arab. He would tell anyone he saw about the rites and rituals he had performed.”

  Daniel blinked at that. The professor’s words didn’t add up. “Wait, what? Why would he tell others how to do what he didn’t want to do? It still makes no sense.”

  The fire died down to a normal fire as the professor said, “He told all who would listen as a cautionary tale, so other would be on the lookout for other such as he once was. He shared all the rites as a warning as what to look out for. All, but one.”

  “The last rite,” Daniel said.

  The professor nodded. “With one piece missing, the puzzle on how to end creation would never be completed.”

  “He pulled a McGuyver,” Charlie said.

  Daniel had almost forgotten Charlie was there, but his statement clashed with the conversation such that it sounded like the grinding of gears of someone not knowing how to drive a manual transmission. Even the professor seemed slapped out of his train of thought and stared at his grandson. Soon all eyes were on Charlie.

  “A what?” the professor asked.

  Charlie looked up from his bow and seemed surprised to see all eyes on him. He gave a small shrug and said. “Used to be this show about a spy who would improvise things using whatever he could find lying around. He’d build explosives from bubble gum and tin foil, that sort of thing.”

  All three of them continued to stare at Charlie, blinking, and waiting for him to make sense. The professor started to say, “I fail to see . . .”

  “To keep kids from doing what they saw on the tv show and blowing up their bedrooms or whatever,” Charlie continued, “they would always leave out a key ingredient.”

  Then it made sense, though the pieces clicked into place at different times for the three. Bethany was the last to figure out what Charlie was getting at, but her brows went up and her eyes grew wide, and Daniel knew the proverbial light bulb had clicked on. Daniel had gotten the analogy, and he understood what he meant. The Mad Arab wanted people to know enough to recognize the threat, but not enough to become the threat. The last rite, the last piece of the puzzle, he kept to himself. Until now, that was. Someone had told the Mad Arab what the last rite was in the first place, so he wasn’t the sole keeper of the information. It was like a rare baseball card – incredibly hard to find, but not impossible for the most determined.

  “I still don’t understand what this has to do with Bethany.” As he said it, Daniel felt Bethany shrink into herself. There it was. Daniel still didn’t know what this was about, but he understood Bethany did, and that was what was weighing on her shoulders.

  “Even though the princesses sacrifice closed the gate to our world, it cursed her family line,” the professor said. “As it was with the first princess, her family line gave birth to one and only one girl, to bare the curse for that generation.”

  “Then you have the wrong girl,” Daniel said. “Anna had a brother, Marcus . . .”

  The professor raised a hand, cutting Daniel off. “Anna’s true mother disappeared shortly after childbirth. Rebecca Sloan claimed Anna as her own, and the truth was concealed even from Anna in an effort to protect her. Even her half-brother Marcus was part of her cover, but the truth always has a way of resurfacing.”

  Daniel looked at the professor. “How do you know all of this?”

  “In college, when I first learned of the legend of the Mad Arab and the last rite, I found underground groups obsessed with it,” the professor said. “Some sought out the last rite for glory or power, while others wanted to secure the last rite to prevent it from being used. I aligned myself with one of these groups dedicated to keeping the last rite from ever being performed. Together, we tracked the lineage of the Mad Arab to Anna and Bethany. We also learned we weren’t the only ones.”

  “BEC.” Charlie didn’t ask but said it as a statement of fact.

  Daniel looked to Charlie, then back to the professor. “BEC? The corporation? Why?”

  The professor let out a heavy sigh. “I have no idea, but with their money and resources, they were able to do the impossible. They found Bethany and the last rite. They then drove Anna to suicide, for the last rite required the sacrifice to be forsaken,”

  “Why?” Daniel asked.

  The professor was settling back into his teacher’s tone and stance. “The first princess was to be sacrificed by her own father. As long as you kept fighting for her, they could not use her.”

  “I guess I was the monkey wrench the old woman threw into their plans,” Daniel said.

  Now it was the professor’s turn to be surprised. His eyes popped open wide. “You know her?”

  Confirmation that the old woman wasn’t a figment of
Daniel’s imagination caught Charlie by surprise, and he looked up, staring at his grandfather. “Wait, there really is an old woman?”

  “We’ve met,” Daniel said to the professor, ignoring Charlie. He felt a twinge of pleasure over showing Charlie he was right, but then he had scoffed at Charlie’s magic bow so he couldn’t get too angry at the young man. To the professor, he asked, “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know who she is,” the professor said, “but she’s given us counsel and guidance.”

  From next to Daniel, a small voice said, “She said to call her Grandmother.”

  All eyes turned to Bethany. Feeling all those stares on her, Bethany shrunk into herself even further. Daniel felt her hand pulling on his shirt as she ducked behind his back.

  Daniel turned back to the professor. “Okay, I’m still missing something. How are we supposed to end this thing?”

  The professor took a deep breath, and Daniel recognized it. It was the same deep breath he himself would take when he was a cop, before telling waiting parents that their son had driven their car into a tree, or that their daughter was in the hospital after getting drugged at a party and then sexually assaulted. What was coming was bad news.

  “According to the story,” the professor said, “you must let Bethany sacrifice herself to seal the gate.”

  40

  “What?” Daniel asked.

  He had to have misunderstood. These were the people that came to help him save Bethany, they wouldn’t suggest letting a child kill herself. They couldn’t have.

  “Wait . . . what?” Charlie asked. Daniel looked over to him, and he could see in Charlie’s face that he was as caught off-guard as Daniel was. It was clear to Daniel that the professor had elicited his grandson’s help without telling him the whole story. Daniel thought it was because the professor knew Charlie wouldn’t have gone along with any plan that included pre-adolescent suicides.